My sister turned 32 on the day after the election. I was worried she wouldn’t get out of bed. It’s not that Trump was just elected the next president. It’s that America took a crap on everything that matters to her, from civil rights to women’s issues, and she was devastated. Plus she’s thinking about…
Hey, everybody. I’ve been doing a Twitter chat for the past five weeks called #failchat to prepare the market for my GlitchPath launch. Each week, I posted a topic and talked to my audience about overcoming failure. We talked about politics, relationships, and even interpersonal communication. If I had to describe the chat in one…
Last week, I wrote an article called, “How Will Trump Fail?” The article lightly applies the science behind insights to predict the ways in which the Trump administration will fail the American electorate. It’s a piece meant to stimulate a response. My audience consists of mostly upper-middle-class readers who work in HR, marketing, IT, and…
A few weeks ago, I had my garage painted by a fifty-two-year-old woman who just wanted to talk. She’s an individual contributor, proud of her craftsmanship, and wanted to take advantage of the companionship to make small talk and chat about her life. I work from home. I’m alone all day. I get it. So…
The election in America reminds me that interpersonal communication, which is an exchange of information between two or more people, is super complicated. Very few people seek to understand before they speak. We don’t ask enough questions, and we rush to declare our opinions before we even fully realize if the people around us want…
My international friends want to know what the hell is happening in my country. “Why did Hillary Clinton lose?” Well, she didn’t win the electoral college. That’s not what they’re asking. They want an analysis of what went wrong, but I’m not a big fan of post-mortems. We won’t learn anything from her campaign’s mistakes.…
I’m not obsessed with failure, but I am obsessed with project pre-mortems. The father of the modern pre-mortem is a guy named Gary Klein. He asked his clients to engage in something called prospective hindsight. Here’s how it works: Before you do anything, ask yourself — how will this fail? It’s an easy question, sure,…
The great thing about my life is that every day is different than the last. It’s also a challenge because healthy rituals are lost to travel schedules and client meetings. I have core activities in my life — food, coffee, cats, chores, writing, exercise — but that’s not enough to anchor my day. (Especially if…
For the past month, I’ve been hosting weekly chats on Twitter. They have nothing to do with HR. Each week, the audience tackles failure from a different angle. We’ve talked about “generalized failure disorder,” relationships and managing difficult people at work. The audience is expanding, and the person-to-person interaction is growing more fun and entertaining…
There’s another new HR technology conference on the scene. It’s called HR Tech World San Francisco. The company that organizes this event has a foothold in Europe. Now they’re coming to the states with a pretty stellar line-up of speakers and a desire to clean up the American HR technology conference market. You ask —…
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